“A tough start, and by the time we got going it was all over. Still a lot of fun to play, and although the passing game was limited, what there was was awesome.

So first up, I'm not sure what happened to my magic codpiece. It asked me if I wanted to use it, and when I said yes, it disappeared. That is pretty magic, I suppose.

The dark elves received the kick-off. I don't remember much about the first drive, but it was reasonably quick and reasonably easy for them. I do remember the following drive, however, as the sweltering heat took away both my wardancers and a lineman, and then there was a pitch invasion on the kick-off which left another four of my players on the ground. Luckily, not the thrower or my best catcher though, so feeling there was not much else to do, I ran downfield and threw a long bomb.

There was an outside chance I would survive the following blitz, and sure enough, I did. This allowed me to try and score by dodging into the TZ of a diving tackler, and that one wasn't quite so successful. This led to the dark elves' second score, which took up the rest of the half.

Sweltering heat then turned the tables and left some of the dark elves out - enough that there was a free channel for me to run the catcher down for the one-turner. A quick snap helped, and although the tree nearly messed up by triple POW-POW/skulling the first block against the guy I needed to push, he was forgiven because he BH him. And because I could, I ran the catcher down first and then threw the long bomb for the score.

And that was pretty much that. The whole of the second half was taken up with me messing up my first offence with a double skull on a tree block, and then being forced into a mess of players surrounded by a ring of diving tackle. I was never going to break free, so I just threw to the catcher most likely to survive and hoped for the best.

The best was that he didn't die. He did loose the ball though - as did the wardancer who caught the scatter. And with the ball safe and no apo, kingvan explained that he needed to stall to protect the rest of his players. Reasonable, I suppose, but the wood elves were having none of it and promptly killed another dark elf.

There was a bit of messing about at the end, but the dark elves were in a strong position and were always going to win, even if they messed up the final turn TD - which they didn't.

So a fun game, though a bit bloody. I was sorry to lose the +AG lineman, as he was going to become a pass-blocker, but I decided to take the opportunity to downsize so I retired the injured wardancer and catcher and dropped my rating way down, which is fine as this is my passing team and I'm likely to get some easier opponents now.

It was the diving tackle that did for me here. Pickers United are (unsurprisingly) a really well-built team and every time I needed to get out of a tricky situation I was faced with one or two players with exactly the right skills to stop me: diving tackle, tackle, guard - what a great combo. And so much side step!

They have an absolutely terrible passing game though!”